Overcoming Greed, and So On

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Three immersions — on emptiness, on the signless, on the undirected — are developed to overcome each of seventeen named defilements, nine different ways, closing the Threes with its most systematic and most compressed material.

The three immersions, named without elaboration

Suññata samādhi, emptiness immersion; animitta samādhi, signless immersion; appaṇihita samādhi, undirected immersion — the canon's three doors to liberation, vimokkhamukha, named here as a fixed trio with no definition attached. This chapter assumes a reader who already knows what the three are; its interest is entirely in what they are developed for.

Nine verbs for overcoming one thing

Insight, complete understanding, complete ending, giving up, ending, vanishing, fading away, cessation, giving away — nine near-synonyms for the same underlying movement, applied first to greed and then, in turn, to every defilement on the chapter's list. The repetition is not padding. Piling up near-synonyms for the same process is a technique this collection uses throughout — compare the three words for danger opening AN 3.1 — and here it is run at a scale nowhere else in the Threes approaches.

Seventeen defilements, one after another

Greed, hate, delusion, anger, acrimony, disdain, contempt, jealousy, stinginess, deceitfulness, deviousness, obstinacy, aggression, conceit, arrogance, vanity, and negligence — the list running from the three root defilements through increasingly specific interpersonal and characterological faults, closing on negligence, pamāda, the same quality AN 2.7–9, much earlier in this collection, calls one of the two things that keep the world from dissolving when absent.

Why one hundred seventy discourses fit on one page

Each combination of one defilement and one of the nine verbs is, technically, its own numbered discourse in the traditional count, which is how seventeen items times roughly ten variables yields the span AN 3.183 through AN 3.352. The bilara-data source this site draws from, and Sujato's translation of it, compress the entire run into a single continuous text using the peyyāla convention — the same abbreviation device this chapter's predecessor, AN 3.163–182, already used at a smaller scale. Nothing is lost in the compression; the pattern, once seen once, is completely predictable for every remaining instance.

Closing the Threes

This is the final chapter of the Tika Nipāta, and its closing is announced by the collection's own summary formula — the standard closing line confirming that this is what the Buddha said, and that the mendicants were satisfied and approved. From here the collection would continue into the Fours, the Catukka Nipāta, on a scale considerably larger than anything the Threes have covered.

Key terms